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Facebook offers up a tremendous opportunity to discover new
customers. The social media website is expected to reach a
billion active users this year. According to Alexa.com, Facebook
visitors average over 25 minutes a day visiting the site.

These are highly profiled visitors to advertise to. They've
profiled themselves in detail, itemizing specific and numerous
likes and interests. It's instant market research. Better yet,
Facebook allows businesses to target ads in a laser-like manner.
Ads can be targeted to run only to people who like a particular
thing, are of a specific age and sex, and live in a particular
place.

Facebook
advertising is amazingly affordable. There are ads I'm
presently running for local businesses that cost 8 cents per
1,000 ad impressions, I can reach thousands of highly-targeted
prospects in a local market for only $2 to $3 a day.

Instead of offering set prices, Facebook has prospective
advertisers make bids, either paying per 1,000 impressions or
paying per click. Facebook even lets businesses set budgets that
shut down ads after a daily spending limit is reached.

Get your loyal customers to "like" you. Take
care of your present customers, and get them to "like" your
Facebook page. You may even set up a computer so they can
"like" you in your store. Offer them a deal or a prize in
return. For a few dollars a day, you can then run ads that show
up on the pages of all the regular customers who "like" you.
You can display ads just to people who like you. Sure, you
should also build an email list, but Facebook is a more
friendly channel. If you really just want to remind a thousand
customers today that you're in business -- and you don't want
to annoy them with an email -- display an ad of Facebook.

Seek out obvious customers. Once you've
assembled an audience of loyal customers, the next step is to
seek out new ones through advertising. Some target audiences
are pretty obvious. For example, there's a vegan-friendly
restaurant I like to frequent near my home in Ann Arbor. The
owner runs a Facebook ad targeting all vegans or vegetarians
within 15 miles of the restaurant. That's hundreds of
prospective customers right there. But there are also vegans
who don't specifically list themselves as vegan, but they like
the movie Forks Over Knives. A quick visit to
Amazon.com and we discover people who like Forks Over
Knives also like the book The China Study. The
restaurant owner targets these interests to find ever more
potential new customers.

Find the less-obvious customers. There are
certain types of people you should be advertising to that you
aren't targeting, simply because it isn't intuitive. A
motorcycle repair shop may have a disproportionately high
number of Pink Floyd fans among its customers. The repair-shop
owner should not only be targeting Facebook ads to local Pink
Floyd lovers, but probably playing it in the shop, too, to
build rapport. Figuring this out used be as hard as traveling
to the dark side of the moon, but now a business owner can
figure this out simply by analyzing the pages of people who
"like" the business on Facebook. Facebook makes the dark side
of the moon shine brightly.

For the first time in human history, customers and prospective
customers are volunteering vast amount of information about
themselves, making it publicly available. For a few dollars a
day, it's possible to connect to old customers, find new
customers, and understand them all like never before.